L’Écran du bestiaire

• Published in: Francosphères
• Main Author: Jesse Welton
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Liverpool University Press 2016-01-01
• Subjects: francophone African literature; Mabanckou; Nganang; animal; child; narrator
• Online Access: http://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/franc.2016.12

The most critically successful works of two Central African novelists writing in French, Alain Mabanckou and Patrice Nganang, are told from the point of view of a narrator who, for one reason or another, could be considered intellectually inferior to the average person. This article will show that by appropriating negative colonial stereotypes of Africans as child-like or animal-like, writers are able to provide a counter-discursive response to these stereotypes and gain greater stylistic freedom to indigenize the former colonial language, thanks to the intermediary of what we will call the intellectually subordinate narrator – a narrator who the reader expects, and therefore accepts, to be cognitively different. We will examine how this phenomenon works as a form of strategic exoticism in Mabankou’s Mémoires de porc-épic (2006) and Nganang’s Temps de chien (2001).